Lost Charlie Chaplin Film Pops Up on eBay
Filed under: Classics, Fandom, Newsstand
One day, a man named Morace Park is surfing around eBay, looking for antiques, when he's intrigued by an item listed as an "old film." Housed in a funky antique tin, the man bids and wins it for the super-reasonable price of £3.20. He buys and sells antiques, so when the package arrives, it sits around for a bit. When he finally gets around to opening it, he unfurls some of the film to see what it is. The title reads: Charlie Chaplin in Zepped.Yes, folks, as a story in the Guardian attests, this is a forgotten film that there's no record of. Almost seven minutes long, the short "is a mixture of footage of Chaplin and exuberant animation that reminded Park of Monty Python sequences." Park's neighbor John Dyer says: "It starts with live shots of Chaplin. It then turns into a dreamscape. We see a Zeppelin bombing attack. And then we see Chaplin taking the mickey out of the Zeppelin, at the time a powerful instrument of terror." They deduce that the film is a propaganda piece from the first World War. Park and Dyer have traveled to Los Angeles to learn more about the short, with filmmaker Hammad Khan recording their journey for a documentary.
One has got to assume that whoever sold it never bothered to open the film and see what this "old film" was. Just goes to show you -- old cinematic junk on eBay can lead to stunning discoveries, and never be so lazy as to not see what a film is before selling it.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-07-2009 @ 9:29PM
chuck said...
Hard to believe. Old film was done on celluloid that degrades over time.If it is not copied or preserved, it crumbles to oily like dust
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11-07-2009 @ 11:24PM
Mike Leamon said...
For what it's worth, Chaplin made mention of others using scraps of his performances to create "new" films, but he never mentioned personally making a film called Zepped.
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11-07-2009 @ 11:25PM
kat said...
Dont belive it. Films this old that are not tookin care of would need lots of repairing to be played. Nitrate stock films fall apart. Chaplin was the biggest star then and if it was when he had hit fame it's hard to belive there is no record of it, only unless it never was released, or was not Chaplin but one of his many imposters. The witer should of added more info, whats going to happen to the film now and how do they know what is, and maybe looked in to film preservation. Film preservation is tedious, delicate, and hard work, hats off to those who do it.
http://www.silentera.com/lost/index.html
http://www.filmpreservation.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_preservation
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